Saunders Hall and Flagler Court at the Darden School of Business
Robert A. M. Stern, architect
Courtesy of the Darden School of Business
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In 1992, the Darden School of Business moved next door to a lavish, new campus designed by acclaimed architect Robert A.M. Stern. The Darden School rejected the stark modernism of Stubbins’s complex and returned to a traditional architectural vocabulary, while its relative isolation and scale orient it to the automobile. The reference to Jefferson’s Academical Village is clear. Made of red brick and white columns, rows of buildings on either side of a lawn flank a raised, pedimented building.

Stern first flexed his post-modern muscle at the University in the now-demolished Observatory Hill Dining Hall in 1983. His rehabilitation hid a shed-roofed, modern building built in the early 1970s with pavilion-like porches, Tuscan columns, Chinoiserie railings, and a brick arcade.